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When Myth Metamorphoses to Malevolence New York
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center
10/04/2026 -
Die Stadt ohne Juden
Hans Karl Breslauer (Director), Olga Neuwirth (Composer)
Nonet from Parlando Chamber Orchestra, Ian Niederhoffer (Conductor)
Expulsion clip from Die Stadt ohne Juden (© Film Clip)
“...the Germans love frankness and honesty. It is so convenient to be frank and honest. This confidingness, this complacence, is probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“It pounds daily on the nerves: the insanity of numbers, the uncertain future... An epidemic of fear and naked need: lines of shoppers, long since a customary sight, once more form in front of shops, first in front of one, then in front of all... The lines always send the same signal: the city, the big stone city, will be shopped empty again. Rice, 80,000 marks a pound yesterday, costs 160,000 marks today, and tomorrow perhaps twice as much.”
Friedrich Kroner, on 1923 German hyperinflation
Parlando–the orchestra, the concepts, the iconoclasts–went to the extremes Sunday afternoon. The offering was 1924 Austrian “satire” about Jewish expulsion. The movie was of course banned, lost, a few fragments were found in Holland and finally resurrected in its entirety about 30 years ago.
The The City without Jews was shown in its 80‑minute mesmerizing entirety. And added to this was a musical score by the eminent Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth played by nine members of the Parlando orchestra. They were conducted by New York’s uber‑personable conductor, Ian Niederhoffer, who gave an enlightening introduction.
First, one is always happy to see a film of the era. (The City without Jews was made about Vienna, but the story an obvious reflection about Germany’s burgeoning antisemitism.)
The film was supposedly light-hearted, so it couldn’t reach the epic proportions of, say, Metropolis or Caligari or Nosferatu. Yet–from what we know now–it was less a satire, less a comedy, less caustic than–what conductor Niederhoffer called–“harrowing”.
Or sinister.
Fourteen years before Anschluss, one year before Mein Kampf, director Hans Karl Breslauer could afford to take the original novel’s mythic tale to make a cheerful Austrian movie.
The plot was unnervingly simple. With inflation soaring, the ten‑thousand or so townspeople of Utopia (extras were cheap) place the blame on the Jews. The Chancellor makes a rule expelling the Jews from the town. After expulsion, Utopia sees their favorite taverns turned into ugly beer halls, boutiques turn into shops, and–worst of all (wurst of all?)– nobody outside Utopia wants to trade with them.
The result? Realizing that they need the Jews, the ten‑thousand extras change their Aus mit der Juden signs to Willkommen, Juden.
And they all live happily ever after, from the final 30 seconds.
The problem of this “satire” is that fully a third of the 80 minutes show the Jewish expulsion. It seems endless. Blind old Jews, Jew‑Aryan lovers, synagogues holding their Torahs, family broken up.
Trains with sad Jews trembling, weeping doomed.
These didn’t resemble the reality of a few years later. They could have been documentary shots!! Except that the real trains led to Auschwitz. These trains led to “Zion” or Palestine. Which was the equivalent of hell. (And which Central European Jews rightly feared.)
I helplessly tried to imagine seeing this in Weimar Germany or in Vienna 90 years ago. That was impossible. Instead I saw a well‑made extravaganza of black‑and‑white (or sometimes daguerreotype) of the re‑mastered movie.
And thought hopelessly “It can’t happen here.”
O. Neuwirth/I. Niederhoffer (© Harald Hoffmann/Parlando)
This, though, is a music review, and Parlando’s combo of jazz winds, with cello, viola and keyboard, could have, I thought, had a Weimar Kurt Weill-early Paul Hindemith music to emphasize the comedy.
Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth was commissioned in 2018 to write the score, and would never take the easy way out. Her on‑stage combo almost literally followed the action. (i.e. tenor trombone maliciously sliding to ridicule an anti‑Semitic personage.) Offstage voices were prayerful or playful.
Frequently performed in New York–I remember her Varèse/Mahler mélange Keyframes for a Hippogriffes Musical Calligrams in memoriam Hester Diamond–she perhaps believed felt that a film score should be under the film.
True, it was understated, literal, colorful, but never overcame the eerie 1924 movie itself. Perhaps instead of music, we 2026 viewers should have had a Cassandra wandering down the aisles. Warning, crying and foretelling doom that could overwhelm any State during any era.
Even our own.
Harry Rolnick
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